Camelliorate
Sue and I recently moved into a house we rented that’s a whopping one mile from my previous dwelling. While looking for something in our humid mud room, I saw her pile of Christmas shirts and recalled how I’d told her I wanted a particular gift this year. Curious to see if it was available, I checked a specific website and saw that they had seven in stock.
When attempting to place an order, there was no option for pickup, a puzzling and irritating quirk given the business is in Connecticut. I called and inquired about collecting the items at the location, but the woman who answered said it simply wasn’t an option on their site. Upon checking their site the following day, my fear was confirmed: six items remained in stock. I refreshed the page a few hours later and saw five. Yikes.
I placed the order, paid the ineluctable eighteen-dollar shipping charge, and included a gift receipt note: “I am coming to your location to pick up these plants on Sunday. PLEASE DO NOT SHIP THEM.” Nice try, phone rep. While I loathed myself for the CAPS LOCK instructions, they seemed necessary to ensure my plan worked out minus a hitch.
After I parked and urinated in the business’s secondary parking lot a block away—the only time I don’t have to piss is when I’m pissing—I entered the busy retail office at Logee’s, a regionally famous nursery on the northeastern edge of the state open since the 1890s.
“I placed an online order and am here to pick it up,” I happily informed the green-haired, nose-ringed younger woman behind the register.
“Uh…we don’t do in-store pickup.”
“Huh. I included a note to hold the order rather than ship it so I could pick it up today though.”
“When did you place it?”
“Friday night.”
“Ohhh. Well, our fulfillment team leaves at five on Friday and doesn’t return until Monday morning. That’s why nobody replied to say the order has to be shipped.”
“It has to be shipped?”
“Well, our retail space and online orders are two totally separate things. I can’t fulfill the order, or it will mess with their inventory.”
“But I bought it from your company. Sooo…I paid for items that are absolutely on your premises, but you can’t give them to me?”
“Right. I’m so sorry. They’ll ship tomorrow.”
“I’m not trying to be That Guy, but I drove an hour to pick these up. Is there no possible way you can find them for me? I mean, we know they’re here. I paid for them because I didn’t want them shipped and thought you’d sell out if I waited to come purchase them in person today.”
One of Green Hair’s co-workers silently nodded and confirmed they were now out of stock. A-ha! I had a point. At this juncture, I certainly emitted a peeved vibe, but I like to believe my temperament remained calm. There couldn’t possibly be anything threatening about a bald man wearing a Sade tee shirt and shorts covered in cartoon cats and aliens, right?
“Let me see if I can grab them,” the still semi-reluctant unnamed girl told me, “but it’s unlikely I’ll find where they are.”
I patiently waited for twenty minutes in the retail space memorizing nearly every inch of the stick-filled ceiling and mound of potting soil with accompanying pots of varying sizes beside it, flipped through the company’s colorful catalog, and observed the awkward tension whenever there were briefly no customers and the female employees of varying ages had to pretend I wouldn’t endure my own personal 9/11 in front of them on the eve of that fateful date should my two plants not surface. One elderly couple who’d traveled from ninety miles away exited, but not before the empathetic lady said, “I sure hope you get your plants!”
When the girl returned with the flowerless plants in tow, a slightly unexpected contrast to the beautiful pink buds in the photo on their website, I resisted any negative impulses, simply thrilled she’d made the effort and found my little ladies. However, a new issue unfurled itself: if she couldn’t reach one of the two online fulfillment managers to invoice the order out from home, I couldn’t leave with the plants. “Oh, I’m leaving with these fucking plants,” I told myself, but agreeably pretended her logic made sense, like the time Sue said I could ogle her exposed breasts but only once I contacted the manufacturer of her bra to confirm I had removed it correctly per their convoluted instructions.
Sensing the scene may not end favorably, I informed the nodder, a warm lady who appeared to be in her sixties, how I’d become obsessed with camellias during a distant trip to The Masters, specifically to my beloved tenth hole teeming with them. She knowingly smiled at the mere mention of the golf tournament, lit up when I explained my longtime search and a Vermont nursery employee’s recommendation that I acquire them at Logee’s, and then I further reeled her in by saying how important it was to bring them home to my expectant wife, a similarly devoted Masters and camellia fan who happened to be working at a nursery or else she would’ve traveled with me. It was clear I’d garnered some newfound sway, white lies be damned.
Green Hair explained that it would be another five or ten minutes, so I decamped to the adjoining Rare Plant Room and eavesdropped on a different Logee’s lady recommending that a heavily tattooed customer not use campfire water for her plants, the incomplete inked wings on the customer’s back a surefire indicator that she was a huge Mr. Mister fan. A three hundred-dollar white variegated monstera proved to be the most expensive item in the room, and as I finished inspecting the green commanding serious green, Green Hair walked in smiling.
“You’re in luck! Sarah invoiced them out!”
She handed me my plants then, as she began providing details about emailing the fulfillment team to obtain my refund, I set them down in anticipation of her spiel concluding. When it did, I extended my arms for a warm embrace to mark the joyous result.
"Oh, sorry, I'm not a hugger, but you can take your plants now."
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
My pal, Jamie, or Jamoi, as my inner Francophile sometimes calls him, invited me for an impromptu garage cookout (damn rain ruining logistics of an altogether different variety), my final stop en route home from Logee’s to watch the U.S. Open men’s tennis final. Jamie and his wife, Carol, along with two of their friends, were all a bit inebriated when I surfaced, but proved to be uniformly jolly company for the hour prior to their departure for a heavy metal concert. I sampled some Asian coleslaw (“Slaw with soy sauce, the way they do it in Shanghai per Chairman Mao’s old recipe!”) and potato salad before gifting Jamie a CD copy of Tears for Fears’ greatest hits, a pre-birthday present I’d procured at a record store on the ride back.
“Does it have ‘Mad World’ on here?” he giddily asked me as I handed it to him.
“It must,” I said. “Making you think of Donnie Darko, huh? Greatest movie ever made. Fuck you, Citizen Kane!”
Conversational topics included Jamie’s friend Savannah, or Savvy, her excellent nickname, living in Washington Heights, Elon Musk’s desire to nuke the moon (news to me), and the oddball soundtrack emanating from the living room television speakers. As Carol opened the app to get an Uber ride to the show, I insisted on regaling the room with my Logee’s adventure. If drunk people are brutally honest then I’m proud to reveal that they didn’t think I was an asshole for the attempted in-nursery pickup.
As I extended my hand to Savvy, she opted for an embrace.
“How about another one for the girl who wouldn’t give me one earlier?” I said.
Then I received the much belated, emotionally fulfilling hug I needed. Jamie insisted I take food for the road and sealed a hot dog with a bun in a sandwich bag for me, probably how Logee’s would fulfill a food order.
“What’s the difference between 9/11 and a cow?” I asked him on my way out. “You can’t milk a cow for twenty-two years.”
He laughed and inquired if I’d seen how upset the Japanese were about Barbenheimer, cluelessly creating 9/11 memes in a retaliatory effort to offend us desensitized Americans.
The only way I could be upset is if my camellias never bloom. Yet if that were to somehow happen, I’ll drive the hour back to Logee’s and secretly display the flaccid buds in the Rare Can’t Room with an identifying card: Camellia (Haphephobia genus). Translation? Shrugs, not hugs.